


Dissonance V

by thaliaarche



Series: Dissonance [5]
Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, Grim Reapers, Major Character Undeath, Shinigami, Tone-Content Mismatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 15:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8333218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaliaarche/pseuds/thaliaarche
Summary: A pastel-pink alarm clock rings at 6 A.M, and a reaper kicks off her quilt. Her name is Elizabeth Midford, according to her supervisors, and she belongs to the newly-founded Demon Extinction Division. (Previous knowledge of the series is helpful but not required. This story is a sequel to Dissonance 4.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> I am grateful to the friends and commenters who encouraged me to finally tie up this series. 1 partly-posted WIP down, 3 to go!
> 
> Note: This fic contains some potentially triggering/squicky material that I have chosen not to warn for. Please use your own best judgement.

A pastel-pink alarm clock rings at 6 A.M, and a reaper kicks off her quilt. She gets up, heads to the clock—its tune swings merrily between the first two notes of the _Star Wars_ theme, as her neighbor once remarked after hearing it through the wall — and taps the off button.

Instead of a hoop skirt, she slips on black slacks. In place of a corset, she straps on a Kevlar vest. A black wig covers her blonde hair, a spritz of perfume dampens the scent of her magic, and tinted contact lenses mute the brilliant green of her eyes to hazel.

Her shoes are flat, as always.

The Shinigami Dispatch Society tells her she is Elizabeth Midford, a young British noblewoman who committed suicide in the late 1800s, and she knows better than to ask further. Fortunately, the work of a field agent comes easily to her, so she has suffered no crisis of identity. Her scythe operates as a natural extension of her arm, and she has accepted both the existence of souls and her duty to protect them from demons with unusual speed. She takes her assignments, completes them, and types up her reports with a sincere smile, for she appreciates her straightforward work and her clear role in this new world. At the turn of the millennium, her supervisors recognized her efficiency by recommending her for an elite team— the Demon Extinction Division.

“That demon from the Shanghai feasting rampage just showed up again.” Elizabeth’s partner greets her by handing her his tablet, their newest assignment displayed on the screen. “He’s back to posing as a lawyer, so DED’s sending you to his office.”

Nodding, Elizabeth unlocks the DED office safe and removes an electronic projector the size of her fingernail— Shinigami researchers pieced together the device’s design from recently printed death records, since a spy doomed to die while wearing the mechanism was born just a few months back. She hooks it onto her ear and switches it on, and it immediately overlays her features with a holographic mask, rendering them like some unknown stranger's. Thus disguised, she sets out for the law office.

As always, she first corners the demon, and then he tries to stab her with a bizarre weapon— a ballpoint pen, in this case. She knocks him down and stabs him with her scythe— a diamond-encrusted file, usually a small blade used to sharpen other garden tools, here magnified until its proportions are nearly sword-like. He dies. Elizabeth leaves, types up an official report, grabs supper at the Shinigami mess hall and heads to bed.

The alarm rings.

"This one just got off a contract and is posing as a tailor."

The demon attacks her, this time with needles and a magically reinforced measuring tape he wields like a rope. Elizabeth trips him, tangles him in the tape and knocks him to the ground. Then she stabs him twice for good measure. She fills out the paperwork, eats dinner, and goes to sleep.

The alarm rings.

"DED put us both on this one,” her partner remarks. “She hasn't eaten in centuries— probably like a wild animal, by this point."

They spot the demon curled by an alleyway in the form of an elderly beggar, her wrinkled, shrunken shawl pulled over puffs of gray hair and a weathered face. Baggy clothes pool around her, but her bony, quivering wrists reveal the fragility of her form. At her feet sit an empty cup and a cardboard sign with shaky lettering:

 _HUNGRY_  
_Lost job+house+food_  
_God bless_

She sits still on the concrete sidewalk, eyes locked downwards as the masses hurry by without sparing her a look. With every ripped stitch and smudge of dirt strategically placed, she has perfected the aesthetic of invisibility.

Her nostrils flare when the Shinigami are still a block away, and she disappears into the alley.

“Follow her, I’ll go around!”

“Copy that,” Elizabeth replies, breaking into a sprint. She weaves through the crowd with impossible grace and flies down the alleyway, just as her partner appears on the other side and blocks the exit. The demon speeds up, preparing to bound over his head entirely, when Elizabeth hurls a grenade laced with shrapnel made of recycled scythe blades.

The demon leaps high onto a wall, out of the fireball’s reach, yet several pieces of scrap metal lodge themselves in her limbs. Regardless, she flips elegantly to the ground and—

A bolt of shining silver whooshes towards Elizabeth. She bends back, and it flies mere millimeters over her nose. A flurry of bolts follows, forcing her to dance between knives on blind instinct. One slashes her cheek, and she realizes the blades are surprisingly dull, their damage wrought entirely by the force of the throw. The hilt of another knife smashes into her ear, and she feels the digital mask waver and then blink off—

The fiend stops still for a moment, staring at the reaper’s true face, and the shawl falls back to reveal widened red eyes. Elizabeth lunges forward and stabs her in the neck.

The demon springs back into action, yet a subtle trembling now grips her body, as if she is shaking with suppressed laughter. Her next shots go wide, and the male reaper swipes with his saw, severing the creature’s right arm. When the demon wheels around to kick him in the jaw, Elizabeth chops off the left arm as well. Rags now splattered, drenched with blood, the monster starts scrabbling up the wall with its legs and the bleeding stumps of its arms.

“Where do ya think you’re going?” Elizabeth’s partner raises his saw and lobs it smack between their opponent’s shoulder blades. The demon falls backward and crashes to the ground, shuddering with its full body.

With one smooth stroke, Elizabeth beheads it.

The Cinematic Records that explode from the corpse cause the reapers quite a bit of headache— the threads of the soul are knotted and torn, and light damage has rendered much of it unreadable. Per proper protocol, the male reaper tries viewing a few scenes, only to cry, “A split reel? You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

"Don’t bother, just chop it up,” Elizabeth shrugs. “Their sort’s reels always get marked for the incinerator anyway.”

Though the rest of the mission was quite routine, they spend a good two hours properly reporting the reel’s irregular condition. By the time Elizabeth finishes her forms, DED’s tech analysts have processed the audio-visual recordings of the mission and uploaded them to the organization’s general database. She slips on her headphones and plays the clip.

“Where do ya think you’re going?”

The demon thumps to ground, convulsing, impaled upon the saw. As the latest Shinigami algorithms have refined the recording’s sound quality, Elizabeth can now make out a murmur: “To Ciel.”

She frowns, tilting her head, straining to place a melody she heard long ago . . .

“Hey, Midford, there’s something actually big going down in Houston tomorrow, so I’m moving you to an early shift!”

“Got it!” Elizabeth calls back, giving her boss a thumbs-up and quitting the app. She grabs a speedy dinner at the mess hall, scans the death records for tomorrow, and then goes to sleep.

The next morning, the alarm rings, now running low on battery. The top note dips slightly flat.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. If you liked this, I'd love to hear in the comments!
> 
> P.S. Here's what Lizzie's scythe might look like: https://www.dmtsharp.com/sharpeners/folding-models/diafold-flat-file/


End file.
